Neither the facts of European imperialism nor its motives were what they are often supposed to have been

IT HAS been a millennium of empire. Yes, but which empires? Those overseas of Portugal and Spain, Britain, France and the Netherlands? The mainland ones of Austria or Russia? No. As the era began, Europe was disunited, and feeble. As it ends, Europe and its American heirs dominate the globe. Yet Europe's empires have come and gone, short-lived all of them. And what is thought of as, above all, “the age of empire”, the 40-odd years up to 1914, was not just brief but essentially trivial. Within 80 years all modern European empires were dead.

In contrast, as 1000 dawned, the Roman empire, despite the collapse of its western half, had over 1,200 years behind it and 450, to the fall of Constantinople, its eastern capital, still to go. The Chinese empire was as old, far ahead of Europe, and with 900 years to live. An Arab-Islamic empire over 300 years old was gnawing at Europe; under the Turks soon to take it over, it too had 900 years to come, and a swathe of eastern Europe besides. A Mongol empire was yet to be born, in about 1200. At its peak it stretched from the Pacific to the western side of the Black Sea. It lasted nearly 500 years.

What can Europe show in comparison? Its Holy Roman Empire, the western heir of Rome, was a fake—“neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire,” said Voltaire. The real-world one of the Habsburg family, for a time (under Charles V in the 16th century) included Spain, the Low Countries, much of Germany and chunks of France, Austria, Bohemia, Hungary and Italy. Much slimmed, it survived, as the Austro-Hungarian empire, until 1918; some 450 years in all.

As to the fabled rewards and crimes of imperialism, Charles V left his heir in Spain, Philip II, bankrupt; and an unruly, profitless handful Austro-Hungary proved for its last significant emperor, Franz Joseph, even before a pistol shot killed off his heir, and the peace of Europe, at Sarajevo in June 1914. But the Habsburgs themselves were not bad at killing, colonial-style, as the gory Duke of Alva proved in repressing the rebellious Dutch, on behalf of Philip II and holy church, in 1567; and as Italy learned under Austrian rule three centuries later. The English, under Oliver Cromwell, did much what Alva had, for mirror-image reasons, in Ireland in 1649-50; and that little corner of empire in Europe, already by then under English thumbs for 500 years, remained a colony into the 1920s.

What about the wide world, Europe's empires beyond its shores? Here, classically, is where imperialism flourished, and earned its grim reputation. Much of the reputation was deserved. Yet these empires were even sooner come and gone. So were their rewards; and the reasons most of them took shape had little to do with the economic explanations advanced after that shape suddenly ballooned in the late 19th century.

Spain and Portugal led the way, first into the Americas, later round Africa into the Pacific. Their empires were huge indeed: Brazil's 8.5m square kilometres (not that the Portuguese colonists ever saw much of them) are nearly 100 times the area of mainland Portugal. Yet the Portuguese stayed little over 300 years there, until the 1820s. Their African empire, on two sides of that continent, lasted 150 more, mainly because the rest of Europe in the 1880s could not decide how to carve it up. The Spanish empire, though far more profitable and subject to a far greater power, lasted even less; essentially, the same period as Portugal's in Latin America, though Caribbean and Pacific specks remained to be wiped up by the United States in 1898.

Germany by 1900 was the big industrial power in Europe, and rapidly becoming a maritime one too. It was eager for its belated “place in the sun”, and in Europe's 1880s scramble for Africa had already got some large slices, 2.5m sq km or so, plus some bits and pieces in the Pacific—and no noticeable profit whatever. Within 35 years, during and after the first world war, it lost the lot. As for Italy, its first attack on Ethiopia, in 1896, was beaten off, and three other bits of Africa that it did acquire were its, quite profitlessly, for 50 years at most. And Belgium? Into central Africa and out again, by 1962, within 80 years.

Ah, but what about the serious imperialists of northern Europe, the Dutch, French and British? Serious they were, but even these empires were short-lived.

The Dutch were 250 years in Indonesia. France claimed Canada in 1534 and lost it 229 years later. French Indo-China lasted not 100 years before the humiliation of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. French Africa, some 10m sq km of it? Except in Algeria, not even that long.

The British empire deserves its fame. It was huge, as Russia's Asian territories were and are; at its peak, some 34m sq km, over one-fifth of the land area of the globe. Unlike Asian Russia, it was also populous; until 1947 it included the huge numbers of the Indian subcontinent. Yet its colonies on the American seaboard were British for less than 170 years. Australia, Canada and New Zealand remained British for about 100 years apiece before being handed over to their (settler) inhabitants. South Africa's Afrikaners were barely defeated in 1902 before they—not its blacks, of course—got their land back in 1910. The British were not much more adhesive even in the lands whose only claimants were brown or black: less than 200 years in India, 80 or fewer in most of Africa. The Caribbean was the one significant exception.

So why set out? And why not stay?

On the face of it, all this is very odd. Europe's ideas and money and weapons gave it greater power than any other group of peoples in history. And after 200 or 300 years, it walked out. Even the Russians have done so. Their 19th-century seizures of central Asia were done with a speed and violence that make the United States' westward expansion and Indian wars look like a leisurely church picnic. And, unlike others, under communism the Russians showed no sign of remorse, let alone of getting out. Yet out of central Asia in the 1990s they went, retaining vast areas of Siberia, it's true, but most of them barely inhabited and, today at least, barely habitable and economically useless.

So why did the imperialists ever set forth? One common, only mildly left-wing, answer is that the booming capitalist economies of the 19th century needed an assured supply of raw materials, assured new markets and new places to invest in. And why, having gone and grabbed these, did the imperialists come home so relatively soon? The standard answer is that, for all its relative strength, Europe, exhausted by the second world war, saw it could not afford to hold on, in the face of assertive liberation movements. Besides (here the left chimes in), it realised that it could get what it wanted more conveniently under neo-colonial forms.

There is plainly some truth in this; and, rather less plainly, some falsehood.

The early empire-builders, from Spain and Portugal, were in the Americas partly in pursuit of souls; it takes heroic refusal to accept men's account of their own motives to deny that. They were also, more earnestly, in pursuit of precious metals. They cared little for trade. Spain kept foreign ships out, but hardly encouraged Spanish ones: the crown, to increase its own revenue, at one time limited them to just one port in Spain, Seville, and two in the Americas. Likewise, its efforts to tax the trade simply boosted intra-colonial commerce, lessening exports from Spain.

Later on, the Dutch indeed acquired their empire to protect their trade. And they were after commodities. But not as raw materials: these were spices, for resale. Britain too acquired parts of its empire through, or to aid, its traders; the old joke that it did so “in a fit of absent-mindedness” is tosh. Yet not wholly tosh. Its American colonies were indeed a valued market; but that is not why Britain came by them. It took Canada, from France, mainly to protect these, not for its own poor value. India, initially, was a source of manufactures, not a market for them; only later did it become that. Australia and New Zealand, when first claimed, had no commercial value at all.

Of course, one can reply that all this predated 19th-century capitalism. Yes, but an explanation of empire that explains only its last 80 years is not very useful. In fact, it does not explain much of that period either.

Securing raw materials by the 1880s really was not an issue; they were indeed needed, in ever-greater volume, but they could be, and were, bought from willing suppliers as they are now. As for markets, it is true that Europe's industrialists were starting to fear overproduction, and its governments—rather later—to install protective tariffs. Yet, even in what they saw as the depression years of 1875-95, economies were growing fast. And whatever the dreams, the reality was that, with the big exception of British sales to India (an empire already a century old), imperial markets did not amount to much; least of all, the new colonies of “the age of empire”, trivial compared to markets at home.

What did Germany sell to its 14m new colonial subjects? France to its vast new areas of Africa, or even to richer Indochina? The British to Burma, taken over in 1886? The Belgians to their brutalised Congolese? Precious little, even as a share of exports, let alone of total sales. In this heyday of empire, four-fifths of the trade (and investment abroad) of European countries was with each other or developed countries abroad.

The main economic motive was surely far simpler: that of the British and Dutch for centuries earlier, the simple greed of men who reckoned they could make money “out there”, and who preferred, once it proved true, to be protected and governed by their own kind. Hence the quasi-colonial concessions wrung by sundry countries from China; not just the right for their traders to trade, but to do so under, more or less, their own administration. Hence Britain's seizure of South Africa: once adventurers like Cecil Rhodes discovered its riches, who was to run the place? Unsurprisingly, Britons preferred Britons to Boers.

At least as big a drive behind the new imperialism were the rivalries of the powers. Britain, beside the peacock pride of empire, had solid strategic reasons: owning India, it needed first its old Cape Colony, later the new Suez canal, then Egypt, then the coaling station of Aden. Others fed mainly their egos. A colony, as the German emperor made plain, was a feather in one's cap—and not in the other fellow's. Italy, having got three, as late as the 1930s went for Ethiopia again; succeeded this time, and found it as useless as the others.

Why the Europeans?

Whatever their motives, why was it Europeans who sailed worldwide and built empires? Why not (until Japan moved into Taiwan in 1895, then Korea, then Manchuria) other powers? One reason is that some others, such as the Mongols, did not need to; they used horses. Others chose not to. China “had the men, it had the ships, it had the money too”; yet a 15th-century emperor banned the building of sea-going vessels. Two centuries later, Japan did likewise. Both countries looked inward.

The Turks might have gone worldwide. Their galleys were good enough to strike fear for centuries in the Mediterranean. But their empire needed no more, and they never built ships fit for the oceans. It was Algerian corsairs, not the Turkish empire, who on one occasion raided as far north as Iceland.

But there was more to it than that. Europe had the men, the ships, the money, and on top it had the guns. It knew how to put all four together. No one else did, bar the Americans, who challenged Britain's navy in the 1770s, and blew Spain's apart in 1898; as, more significantly, Japan's navy did to Russia's at the battle of Tsushima in 1905.

But Europe had something more valuable, in this context, than technology. It had commercial enterprise and rivalries. Its umpteen states were often at war, their merchants always competing: two forces that drive technology and much else. The Spanish and Portuguese claimed a monopoly of the oceans and the Americas. Dutch, British and French sea-captains and merchants soon set out to disprove it.

And yet, quite rapidly, they all went home. Why? Spain and Portugal quit because, in and after the Napoleonic wars, they were too weak to subdue their Latin American subjects. Equally, the great decolonisation of 1945-75 would have been delayed had not Japan cracked Europe's Asian empires; and war, and later American pressure, left their owners too exhausted to glue them together again. As all imperialists have found, Mongols and Turks included, keeping the thing in one piece is a costly business.

Yet there was more to the great retreat than that. The British had to be kicked out by the future United States, indeed. Yet they chose to leave Canada, Australia and, eventually, South Africa. Even while tirelessly pretending the time was not ripe to quit India, they preached (elsewhere) the values that proved them wrong, and they tolerated those Indians who said so. The “wind of change”—a Conservative prime minister's phrase—that swept them from Africa was not just one of economic or geopolitical realism; it was also one of ideas, ideas that they themselves held. The French were tougher: they fought two vicious wars trying to retain Vietnam and Algeria. Yet the ideas were French too. The end of the European empires was indeed a triumph for the liberation movements; but one over Europe's stubbornness, not its best beliefs.